Same with car-sharing. In theory good but in practice I'd rather own my car 100x than finding a car, making photos to record any damage, handling rubbish from others etc.
The crappy share-bicycles that nobody is responsible for also are kind of the opposite of the lender-owned car sharing car that might have predatory lending conditions.
In the end, what I would much prefer is sharing, yes. Treating vehicle infrastructure as public property (for the vehicles themselves, this must be more nuanced, especially for commmercial ones).
I don't think this requires a radical shift to "sharing economy" for everything.
But I get your issue with the idea. Most people have issues with this idea.
However, how public space is used never is an individual decision.
Car owners don't use their cars on their own property. And the more cars we use, the less mobile we are, in cities.
Now I'm knee-deep in the discussion I didn't want, I won't see this changing in my lifetime I guess, I think it demonstrates a fundamental flaw in economic logic to treat car ownership as something that is only the responsibility and freedom of individuals, because cars are only useful when everything is built for cars, and in dense areas, this restricts the freedom of others, it's not only about the freedom to have a car.
Everybody is free to buy a car and put it into their garden.
Btw, I agree about the crappy bicycles, like I said, I don't get why you equate this with every idea about changing traffic policies around cars, which are not something that revolves naturally from the right to own property. The topic is that using cars for anything requires to use other's property.
The ages-old urban planning discussion.
Again, I got myself into this discussion that I didn't want and that tends to make me misanthropic, so I'll check out here. I'm also in working hours and need to leave.
Have a good day.
My gripe with the autonomous cars is that they still need to park _somewhere_. They might park further away, but the company that parks their car closest to the pick up point will have an advantage over competition and thus the incentive would be to have the cars as close to customers as possible (lower cost of pickup, quicker turn around, potentially higher price for faster pickup).
People don't pay for the external costs of their vehicles, so it should be required to use vehicles efficiently.
This is not a technological question, but a political, and Google ain't going to solve it without an incentive.
But autonomous vehicles could in theory transform car traffic by huge amounts in dense areas, without sacrificing mobility. Munich is a metropolitan area.
The biggest hindrance to mobility in large cities are usually cars and car infrastructure themselves, because the incentives from countries and for companies are to waste space and energy, and subsidize that.
Ride sharing with autonomous vehicles could reduce need for private cars enormously. Not that I think it's gonna happen in Munich because of Google now.
The technology could just help with it.
Alas, Sorry, I wrote quite a bit already, but I don't want to expand on this repetitive discussion for my own sanity.
And yeah, when people want to have many cars and money can be made by building many cars, even subsidized by the state, the we will continue to block more space with them and build more.
"Meatbags" want it, since the successful lobbying of automotive industry to subordinate all public space and resources in the first half of the 20th century.